Hope
by nimmieamee
Summary: Minific. On Tom's punishment.


Should even very wicked people have hope?

Let me tell you the story of the most foolish being that ever lived. Bully: he did not believe that other people are entire universes, with thoughts and dreams and worth of their own, each a great cosmos precious in its own right. So he sought to destroy them or use them up, a child heedless and uncaring of the damage he did.

Imbecile: he was born with such power and beauty and cleverness, and believed this the measure of him, and so too of others. He could find no essential worth beyond these things. Stacking up his fellows according to traits like blood, power, facility with charmswork, he missed completely the spark which made them all his equal. He determined that the world was an easily-understood hierarchy, with himself at the top. What a simple explanation for such a little dullard!

Coward: he despaired at that which he did not know and could not understand. Oh, what do you mean to say that there will come an end? Something we cannot control? How frightful! What do you mean to say that we must all have the courage to bend the knee to death?

For if we don't, what happened to him shall happen to us. We will be trapped in that waystation, mangled and alone. And the great twinkling eyes of the cosmos will pass us over, like so much trash, though in life we may have been handsome and powerful, clever and worthy.

It is hard to offer any hope to a creature as obstinate, stupid, and cruel as this wicked one was. And indeed in life he became a devourer of hope, he struck down heroines in the nursery, and scrawled out death in his childhood diary, and the pieces he left of himself in others were not the kindnesses that one ought to leave. They were chunks of savagery and spite, carved from his soul and the flesh of his victims, which of necessity had to be destroyed.

And every act reverberated upon him until he was as he is now: hideous, scarred, incomplete. His own sordid masterpiece, a fragment of a man, simply a barbarous visage of sinew and screaming mouth, with no humanity left. And no hope.

But the others, they who have not allowed themselves to become what he did? They have hope. Though they retain the scars he left, they live spreading kindness, curbing their arrogance, and facing their fears. And so the imprint of him that remains on the earth is shrouded — through no goodness on his part — in exactly that force, that love, that he lacked in life.

The girl who read the diary is grown stronger, has not allowed it to defeat her, and so someday she will pass the wailing infant in that great train depot, and she will not even notice him there. She will be too busy waving in joy at the freckled arms and faces behind the train windows — mum! dad! two _most_ beloved brothers, united once more! And her scars will slough off and join their maker, and the pain will mean nothing. Only her joy will remain.

The boy who slew the snake, too, who never knew the parents this wicked being marked for death, but who faced their empty husks each year… He will be eager to greet them in some form, and will not bother to delay. His pain will be thrown off, and cast under the seat, and when the train comes he will board, unafraid.

This wailing infant under the bench will not have hope, you see, until he collects all those evils he has wrought in life. These are what is left of him, something less human than a soul, but something all the same: the betrayal of that beautiful ghost, who will take some time to reach the train station; the despair of a house-elf, who saw his master sacrificed to the undead; the grief forced on the family of an Albanian peasant, and on the families of those slain for having impure blood. The green-eyed hero who would have been a normal boy, a beloved boy, if our villainous being had not stolen into his nursery and murdered those who loved him.

And many more. Ten million shattered pieces of pain, which Tom must wait, in limbo, to collect back up again.

But someday the last will return to him. Perhaps it will be the green-eyed boy, old and happy, the only one who thinks to search for Tom under the seat, and the only who looks on him with pity, who looks on him at all.

And then Tom will be as complete as he can be. Not complete enough to board the train. Not complete enough to have earned some joy. But he will find that he can cobble together a working form, though a scarred one, and he will stand, and pass out of the platform one last time. Tom can never pass through the barrier in reverse after this; he can never touch life and magic again, for he has left nothing good to call him back. But he will find that on the other side there is a hall, almost like the Great Hall of Hogwarts, and there is not joy waiting for him there, for Tom has not earned it. But there is numbing calm, and peace. For this is Death's hall, where Tom will be trapped forevermore, a foot soldier now, devising fitting ends for those who would hurt others in order to escape death (for death and ends have ever been Tom's greatest talents).

And Tom, at last the Boy Who Died, will be content.

"Don't fly away now, Tom," Death will say.

(Death has such black humor.)

But by now Tom does not wish to. Tom was forced to gather all his pain back up again, while waiting mangled and alone. And in that time he learned to hope for death.

* * *

originally posted on my tumblr, livesandliesofwizards.


End file.
